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Star Wars: "Interference"

My second short story for StarWars.com — originally available to Hyperspace members, but now available for free from Suvudu here — elaborated of something I'd considered for the text pages of the Knights of the Old Republic comics series. In 2007, each issue of Knights included a text page including news reports from within the Star Wars universe that related to the storyline; often, these included opinion pieces in the voices of characters in the fictional world.

When "Vector" started in 2008, those pages were retired — but I had already worked out ideas for a couple of the issues that were timed to coincide with the Mandalorian siege of Taris, and so I considered working one of them into a short story. I had always been interested in propaganda broadcasts of the sort that Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose dispatched across the battle lines in World War II — psychological operations meant to dispirit the soldiers on the other side. The Republic in this time had its own such character, I imagined, named Captain Goodvalor.

Thus, "Interference" follows a sequence of broadcasts by Goodvalor, followed by the reactions of a typical Mandalorian, illustrating the disconnect between what Republic officials thought of the Mandalorians, and how the Mandies really were. It's more or an exchange of letters than a dialogue, similar to some of Woody Allen's short stories -- and while it's intended to be about as serious, it does still illustrate that cultural disconnect.

TRIVIA

• The last broadcast of William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, can be heard here. It's one of the things I listened to in coming up with Goodvalor's dialogue near the end of the story.


• The non-existent ship, Serroco, is named after the site of a previous battle, shown in #15 of the comics series.
  
  
• Goodvalor, of course, has a connection to Gryph, as we find out in Knights of the Old Republic - Demon. But the speaker for Goodvalor on Zongurlu is Gryph's brother; there was no time for Gryph to have gone there and returned to Taris when he did.
  
  
• Koblus Sornell turns up years later in Knights of the Old Republic - War, her name abbreviated to Ko. The misunderstanding of Mandalorians by the Republic — and vice-versa — is a theme there. Neither Gryph, nor Ko, nor the readers when the story was released would know who was really speaking until several years later!